


the thing about gravity

by novel_concept26



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fix-It of Sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27247501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novel_concept26/pseuds/novel_concept26
Summary: The thing about gravity, Jamie sometimes thinks--more and more, if she’s honest with herself, as the years roll by and the memories grow thinner--is in its inevitability.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 24
Kudos: 307





	the thing about gravity

The thing about gravity is...

Well, the thing about gravity is, it’s inescapable, isn’t it? By definition. Gravity: noun. _The force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass._ You don’t fight gravity. You plan for it, or plan around it; you don’t fight.

The thing about gravity is, it doesn’t let go just because its convenient. It doesn’t let go because time marches onward, because the seasons change, even in the event a person wants it to. 

The thing about gravity, Jamie sometimes thinks--more and more, if she’s honest with herself, as the years roll by and the memories grow thinner--is in its inevitability.

Maybe this wasn’t what Dani would have wanted. Maybe not. But there’s something about it Jamie hasn’t been able to let go of. Not the year Dani left her. Not the year after that. Not sitting at Flora’s wedding, regaling a room of mostly-strangers with the tale of their life together. 

Not now. 

There’s a lot in life a person chooses, thinks Jamie, watching herself move around the bathroom in a mirror scrubbed clean as ever. Her hands are precise, her motions certain; if they tremble upon the toothbrush, the lipstick, the washcloth, it’s nothing of alarm. Nothing of note. Just part and parcel of moving forward through the years. 

Moving forward, as it were, alone. 

She hates that word, Jamie does. Alone. Didn’t use to. Used to be, _alone_ suited her just fine. Maybe better than anything else. _Alone_ left no room for other people’s manipulations, for sharp words or hot water spilled on soft skin. _Alone_ could allow for accidents, but not embarrassments. Not shame. Just the art of learning the next path forward on your own time. 

And then came blue eyes, thumbs tucked into fists, a brandished fire poker. An adoration Jamie had never before thought she needed. A kiss in a greenhouse, watched by ghosts. 

She wouldn’t trade any of it, even now. Not an inch of what she was able to buy, borrow, and steal with Dani. It was _theirs_ \--the messy nights, the languid mornings, the hot tears, the tight embraces. It was theirs, every fern and ficus, every flower, every burned stew and perfect, beautiful laugh. She didn’t get enough time with Dani--Christ, could anything ever be enough, with Dani?--but she knows it was more than they were promised. More than anyone’s promised. She’s grateful, as the lines spring up around her eyes, drawing webs of exhaustion into her skin. She’s grateful, as the strength seeps out of her knees and her hands begin to ache in the cold. She’s so goddamn grateful. 

And still. Still, that pull. Because gravity doesn’t fade with time. Gravity doesn’t release simply because other people say it should. 

In a way, Jamie finds this reassuring. This one thing, this one immutable _fact_ of reality. Even as Miles raises sons of his own, as Flora develops a line of children’s dolls far more advanced than anything she grafted as child, as Owen begins preparing to pass his restaurant down to those younger and more spry. Henry’s gone now, long gone, and Jamie sometimes wonders if he felt it, near the end. If the pull tugged at his trouser leg in those last moments like an errant child. 

Probably not. Henry had his own kind of gravity, didn’t he, made up of those kids and their parents and their bundled-up tragedy. Wasn’t like this. Wasn’t like this at all. She hopes he was happy when he went in his sleep, buoyed on soft dreams of a lost lover’s caress. Hopes he left those kids knowing they’d made it through all the shadows and into the sunlight on the other side.

Owen laughs a lot, when they see each other, about who’s likely to go next. He thinks it’ll be him. She asks him once what he believes he’ll see on the other side, and he’s silent for a long stretch. Long enough for her to know his kind of gravity hasn’t let go, either. 

“She’d want to be,” he says quietly, gesturing toward the ceiling of his flat. “You know. Up there.”

“If anyone could get in,” Jamie mutters, and they’re both grinning. He’s regrown his mustache, a fit of youthful pique that makes her feel like they’re both thirty again. She reaches up, almost expecting to find soil caked into her hair. 

“I’ve never known what to believe,” he says. “Not the way she did, not with any kind of...faith. But I like to think we get back what we put in. That if she believed she’d go to heaven, to _her_ Heaven, then that’s what she got.”

Jamie waits. She knows him too well, knows he’s getting around to it. And, after another thoughtful sip of wine, he does.

“I don’t know what to believe,” he repeats, and there's the faintest tremor in his voice. “But I know what I would love. I hope...I hope she’s left a place for me. In whatever way you can.”

Jamie reaches over, squeezes his hand. He presses the other to his eyes, inhales deeply. 

“Well,” she says at last, “you’ll have to ring me when you find out. I plan to beat you there.”

And they laugh, laugh like old times, like bulky jackets in the rain and spitting bonfires and cake that maybe needs strawberry, maybe needs lemon. They laugh, him believing she’s joking, her knowing she isn’t.

Fact is, with some kinds of gravity, you can feel it. Tugging at your clothes. Whispering around your hair with the breeze. Guiding you forward like a soft hand at the small of your back. Maybe not everyone is granted this kind of luxury, but Jamie thinks Dani was. Thinks it explains everything, really. 

And hasn’t she been smelling Dani more and more, after all these years? Not just when she stumbles upon an old package in the back of the closet, a shirt she somehow missed after all this time, but just...sitting. Just sitting with a book, or waking in the night with the sensation of an arm around her waist. It’ll come without warning, a hint of Dani, and then gone. 

And hasn’t she been hearing Dani, in the strangest of ways? A snatch of song hummed from a lifetime away. A single peal of that deliriously-breathless laughter. A sigh, the way she only sighed when Jamie kissed her collarbone. Never for any reason she can clarify, never from something so lucky as a tape or a video, just...a signal. Brief. Echoing. 

It’s madness, she thinks at first, and then, slowly...no. Not madness. Memory. Memory returning, a little stronger, a little clearer, every year. As if some great cosmic force is actually funneling Dani back to her, instead of clearing out the last of the cobwebs. 

A gift. The greatest gift. She can’t say whether she’s earned it, and she certainly isn’t going to try explaining it to anyone else, but...

She wakes one morning, and thinks, _is this how she felt? Is this how she knew?_ There was a note when Dani went, a single page dictated in her slightly-slanted script. Not an explanation or an excuse; simply _I love you, and I loved you, and I will love you. There will be other nights, Jamie. Live._

And Jamie did, she thinks with a stab of impatience even now. Jamie _did_ live. For years, for _decades,_ she’s gone on without that smile. Without having Dani there on the other end of the phone, without Dani’s hands on her hips when they danced, without Dani’s ring clinking lightly against her own as they bumped hands across a dinner table. Without Dani, she crawled out of bed each morning and walked through another day. And another. And another. She attended weddings and funerals without Dani; held Miles’ son without Dani; hugged Flora tight as she wept over some accident or other without Dani. She walked the world and she hurt and she cried and she _lived_ without Dani. 

And now...

Now, that old gravity. Coming to call. 

It isn’t a bad thing, Jamie thinks all the way over on the plane. She’s a picture of parallel storytelling, dressed in her oldest brown flannel shirt, a pair of jeans with holes in the knees, a pair of Converse high-tops that never quite fit right again after a trip into a lake. Her back is bowed, and her hip clicks when she walks from the taxi up the winding drive. It’s not the same, exactly, as last time. 

In a way, that’s the greatest mercy. She never could have done this, if she’d thought she’d walk that same path as the same woman who did it so many years ago. The path is the same, perhaps, but the woman is changed. The woman has learned so much about what it is to live in a world that doesn’t have Dani Clayton in it. 

She doesn't go to the lake. She goes instead to the house, to whose front door Miles has so kindly granted her a key. He thinks she’s after pure nostalgia, searching for monsters or memories he doesn’t even know he’s missing. Just an old woman, trying to tie her life together with an attractive bow. 

Bless him. He doesn’t need to understand this. If any of them ever do put it together, it will be Owen, and Owen alone. She thinks he might be a little upset with her, but not unforgiving. She thinks, if it had been Hannah, he’d do the same thing. 

Bly yawns open to her, a great good place brimming over with great complicated history. She walks its rooms slowly, hands brushing over tables and wallpaper and the spot where she always leaned her hip and tossed chopped vegetables into Flora’s hair. She remembers: fixing this lamp, retiling this bathroom, sweeping this front hall. This was hers, before she ever thought to have anything else. A great good place to keep safe and sane. 

The kitchen is hard. Upstairs is harder. Her knees creak, and she has to pause for breath before laying her hand on that doorknob. She tells herself it’s old lungs, too many cigarettes, too little clean country air. She tells herself it’s anything except the truth. 

For moment, she’s granted one of those gifts. A windfall of blonde hair on the pillowcase, a bare shoulder, a single freckle she’d gone nearly wild upon finding on otherwise clear skin. She closes her eyes, breathes in the stale air of a room gone unused for decades, and thinks it might be the moment right here and now. That fist of gravity, tightening like a reflex around her heart. 

But, no. Not yet. There’s one place, one more sight to see. 

The sun is nearly set by the time she reaches the greenhouse. She leans her weight against the doorframe, peering inside. It hurts her a little, to see the chaos that has unfurled in her absence. Miles is a good man, but he’s never been much for plants, for quiet cultivation, for long stretches of silence alone in a humid space. Without Jamie’s tending, the life in this room has sprung up in all the wrong places, gone absolutely bananas in all the wrong ways. It isn’t pretty, it isn’t neat, and she almost hates it. 

_Organic_ , she thinks wryly, tapping a fist once, twice, against the doorframe. _It’s all just bloody organic, and who am I to try to prune any of it now?_

She walks the room like she walked the house, slow, methodical. Tipped-over planters, she sets to rights. Weeds gone feral, she brushes her fingertips across. It’s not pretty in here, but it is most certainly alive. More alive than it ever was in her care, maybe. There’s something to that. 

A blanket is still spread across the little sofa she used to nap on when the days got especially hot and lazy. She settles herself in, drapes the musty plaid over her lap, leans back against the arm. If she squints, she can almost see another frame wedged in beside her, stiff and trying not to take up too much space. 

_Oy. Dead boyfriend. It’s over._

It’s a laugh that tastes more like a sob--just one of those dumb little things, one of many that still can set her off at a moment’s notice, and is it still called a haunting if you wouldn’t give it up for the world?--and she bites into her knuckles to muffle the sound. The sky outside has gone a rolling purple, nearly at day’s end. It was a nice sunset, she thinks. A good send-off. 

When they find her--when Miles finds her, to be most specific--they’ll think this is how the story ends. An old woman in a greenhouse, asleep. An old woman in a greenhouse, enveloped in endless dream. Miles will cry. He will hoist her into his arms, stand with her the way she once could stand with him on a long night spent dozing by the fireplace, and he will carry her with all the tenderness a ten-year-old boy can never manage. 

It will be a fitting end, for the gardener. 

It will not be the last of Jamie Clayton. 

When she wakes next, the arthritis in her hands has gone. Her knees bend--a bit of resistance, perhaps, but nothing insurmountable. Her eyes peer through the shadows with a keen awareness she’s almost forgotten. 

The ring on her finger gleams--not the tarnished luster of decades’ wear, but like the first time Dani slid it over the knuckle, brought it to her lips, baptized it with a nervous breath. She touches it lightly. Glances back over her shoulder at the old woman beneath her thin blanket. Takes a good, long look to cement gravity’s hold. 

_Live_ , she thinks, _god, yes, Dani. I lived. And when all was said and done, wasn’t I always going to choose you? Wasn’t I always going to come home?_

And here, the part of the story she’s been afraid to flip to all these years. The part she can’t plan for. Can’t spin into something fairy-tale or ghostly. It simply _is_ , simply _will be_ , and whatever happens now, Jamie’s stuck into it. Jamie is in the grip of gravity, as she’d always sort of thought she might be. 

A soft rap, knuckles-- _or a mug_ \--against the greenhouse door. Jamie closes her eyes. Can’t quite bring herself to turn, not yet. 

_Even if_ , she tells herself. _Even if_ it isn’t right. _Even if_ those eyes aren’t hers. _Even if_ those eyes aren’t there at all. 

“Seems an awful long way,” a voice says, mildly amused, “to not even say hello.”

The strength goes out of her all at once, even as she’s spinning, even as her hands are reaching, and Owen was right. Owen was righter than he’ll ever know. It’s what you believe, it’s what you need, it’s what you hope in every stupid aching molecule because sometimes, sometimes the world is not so random and cruel.

Dani could have stepped out of that night, her sweater tucked down past her wrists, her hair pulled back out of her face, and her _face_. As bright and shining with possibility as ever Jamie remembers. Her eyes, blue as the summer sky. Her lips, finding Jamie’s like there wasn’t so much as a day gone without. 

“Didn’t know,” Jamie realizes she’s gasping. “Didn’t know if it would--if you would--”

Dani presses into her forehead, nose nuzzling gently, lips stealing her breath. A ghost story in the flesh--and yet, somehow, a fairy-tale, too. A woman, and a memory, and a heartbeat made of something so precious, Jamie’s sure she isn't worthy. 

“You cheated,” Dani says, laughing into the side of her face, kissing everywhere she can reach. “You weren’t meant to follow me.”

She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds as in love as she was the night she tried to coax Jamie into just one more kiss in that hallway. 

“You asked me to come back,” Jamie reminds her, hands anchored around Dani’s back, feeling young and strong and better than the last few decades could dream. “You asked me to stay.”

Gravity’s like that. Gravity’s bigger than one person’s selfless heart, bigger than one person’s desperation. Gravity pulls, and maybe it takes time--maybe all things have their time, their place, their two months of blossom for every plant--but, eventually, gravity always wins out. And Jamie could ask questions: how it all works, why Dani’s still Dani, how much of it they’ll remember as the time slips away into nothing. She could make a story out of it. 

Instead, she pulls Dani close, winds the fingers of her left hand with the fingers of Dani’s right, and thinks every ghost story needs an ending like this. An ending steeped in love, in mystery, in shadow, in forever. 

The thing about gravity is, no matter how long it takes, it always pulls you toward home. 


End file.
